Stream-winners cannot be reborn in the lower realms — animal, hungry ghosts, jealous gods, or in hell. They can be reborn in the human realm, or in any of the deva and brahma realms, except for the Suddhāvasa Pure Abodes, where only Non-returners are reborn. They will, of course, become Non-returners and then Arahants within seven lifetimes.

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:Stream-winners cannot be reborn in the lower realms — animal, hungry ghosts, jealous gods, or in hell. They can be reborn in the human realm, or in any of the deva and brahma realms, except for the Suddhāvasa Pure Abodes, where only Non-returners are reborn. They will, of course, become Non-returners and then Arahants within seven lifetimes.

How could they become non-returners "and then" Arahants? If they don't return, where and how would they be reborn as Arahants?

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:Stream-winners cannot be reborn in the lower realms — animal, hungry ghosts, jealous gods, or in hell. They can be reborn in the human realm, or in any of the deva and brahma realms, except for the Suddhāvasa Pure Abodes, where only Non-returners are reborn.

Pleased to see you participating here, Bhante.

If a stream-winner is reborn as a human being, is the child remarkable in some way? Would they be born already having faith in the dhamma?

Is there an explanation for why it's seven lifetimes? I reason that the stream-winner who is born one, two, three etc. times must be distinctive in some way, to be guaranteed of at most six, five, four, etc. additional births, but I find it hard to imagine what sort of quality one might have by virtue of reaching the stream and then being reborn three times (say) that one would not necessarily have after just reaching the stream and being born twice more. But that's just a failure of my imagination. I wonder whether it can be attributed to fetters being weakened in specific ways.